Power Laces Take Us 5 Years Into The Future

July 5, 2010 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROEZs0HpFQc]

Back to the Future Part 2 provided a glimpse of a future that included hover boards and holographic advertisements. But you don’t have to wait until 2015 to get your hands on at least some of the technology. [Blake Bevin] has produced a pair of shoes with power laces as seen in the film. Of course present day technology doesn’t allow him to make the mechanical parts disappear so you’ll have to deal with two servo motors and an Arduino hanging off of your heels. But hey, at least you won’t have to tie your own shoes like some 20th century peasant. No word on using these for a little theme music as you walk around but maybe that’s something from the more distant future.

Flight Simulator But You’re The Plane

May 31, 2010 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

[Rafael Mizrahi] built a flight simulator that lets him fly like Ironman. As you can see in the video after the break, the hardware involves an automotive crane, hang gliding harness, plus the wings and tail from a UAV. A giant fan pointed at the wearer allows him to use the wings and tail to maneuver while the Wii remote strapped to his chest tracks the movement and feeds it to Google Earth Flight Simulator which is seen through the head-mounted display. We’re used to seeing intense flight simulators but this is something completely different.

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Monitor UV Exposure With Your Sunglasses

May 12, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Tired of those awful sunburns? [Nikko Knappe’s] UV sensing glasses will warn you before you become crisp and red as a lobster. The bump added to the bridge support hides a TSL230R light frequency sensor. The device automatically switches on when the arms are unfolded and starts tracking cumulative exposure. If it detects a rising UV level, or you are about to burn based on skin type, an LED inside one arm of the frames will flash to inform you.

This has some potential if you think David Brin’s Earth outlines how climate change is really going to play out. Either way it’s still fun and we give bonus points to [Nikko] for disguising the lilypad that controls this as a flowery hair-pin.

Puppet Circuits

April 28, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 4 Comments

This isn’t a specific project, so much as a pointer to a budding new site. Puppet Circuits is the project of [Raphael Abrams], one of the co founders of NYC Resistor. As you can probably guess, he has been posting about the circuits he uses in his animatronic puppets. I faces all kinds of problems since may of the systems are to be worn and have to endure some pretty rough treatment and still perform well. Very interesting stuff to read about.

Augmented Reality Glasses

April 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

Augmented reality is a pretty neat thing but we don’t want to live our lives staring at a smartphone as we walk around. [F00] didn’t either so he built these augmented reality glasses. You can see a hole in the middle of the glasses where he added a webcam. The camera captures the image in front of you, processes it through augmented reality software, then sends the image to the wearable display that makes up the body of this hack. Integrate this into the head-mounted Linux hack and you’ll be able to ride your bike around the real world with your blast shield down instead of being tethered to your trainer in a virtual universe.

I’m One Step Closer To Azeroth

April 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

While looking for a way to injure his neck and live in the World of Warcraft all at once, [Gavan Woolery] came up with the idea for this virtual reality setup. That monitor, residing just inches from his eyes, is putting out 1080p at 120Hz. His plan is to pair up the motion sensing seen in the video after the break with an NVIDIA 3D Vision Kit for something close to total immersion.

To be fair, [Gavan] never mentions WoW, but we all know where this is going right?

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Reboot Life In A Heartbeat

February 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

This hoodie senses your heartbeat and uses it to control Life. Conway’s Game of Life, popular in all kinds of electronics projects, uses a grid of cells coupled with a set of rules to mimic the life and death of simple organisms. This iteration displays the game over your own heart, then taps into your heart rate, resetting the game at the beginning of each cardiac cycle. We guess you could say that Life goes on only if you do not.

The EKG circuit that detects the heartbeat is made up of an IR transmitter shining through the tip of your finger to a receiver. An ATmega168 running the Arduino bootloader controls the EKG circuit and resets an ATmega48 which is responsible for Life. [Joe] admits that this is overkill but he’s currently without an AVR programmer; he went this route to make it work. The stylishly-geeky hoodie is taken for a test run (er… test-hop?) after the break.

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